The Long High Noon (5 page)

“Telling or selling?”

“Just now I'm fresh out of merchandise, so you can believe what I'm saying. Under other circumstances I'd be fleecing you out of that Dutch eye. I don't like to see a young man squandering his potential on store clerks without a pot to piss in. How much time you got left?”

“Five months, sixteen days, eleven hours, and change.”

“I got another four beyond, on account of I bust that mayor's yellow-wheeled wagon against a telegraph pole misjudging a turn. That's plenty of time to turn you out from Hurly University.”

“Does it come with a key I can hang from my watch chain?”

Hurly tapped the other man's chest. “You wear it in there, and it'll open every door this side of St. Peter. Where you go from there depends on what you learn after you leave here.”

*   *   *

It was in that cell that Cripplehorn learned the best way to sell a man something he didn't want was to refuse to offer it to him.

He learned also to dress consistently and with dash; nothing so tawdry as a gold tooth, but an article of clothing that set him apart from the bowler-hatted drummer and the sharp in the straw boater. In Jefferson City after his release, he picked a pocket hanging on a peg in a barber shop, bought a readymade suit, and booked a coach to St. Louis. On the platform, a fellow in a cloth cap and mackinaw smoking a cigarette thrust a flyer into his hands, printed in square-serif letters on coarse stock:

OPERA HOUSE!

Friday & Saturday, November 17 & 18

Civilization
v.
Savagery!

Border Perils! Indian Fights!

Performed Right On Stage Before Your Eyes!

BUFFALO BILL!

(W. F. Cody)

TEXAS JACK!

(O.B. Omohundro)

PRINCESS DOVE EYE!

(Mme. G. Morlacchi)

CALE DURG!

(E. Z. C. Judson: “Ned” Buntline)

in

Scouts of The Plains

After a glance he crumpled and threw it into a trash barrel, but was accosted three times on his way to a hotel by similarly attired ruffians bearing identical leaflets, and shook his head at a street peddler offering
cartes d'visites
bearing the photographic likenesses of Cody, Omohundro, Morlacchi, et al; others were not so difficult to persuade, as a small group had gathered on the sidewalk to consider the man's wares.

The hotel was a rattrap, the best he could afford while he considered the business of acquiring
dash
. There he made the acquaintance, by proxy, of one Jack Dodger.

He read
Brimstone Bob's Revenge
in one sitting. When he stood at his window and craned his neck, he could just read the gaslit legend on the marquee of the St. Louis Opera House:

SCOUTS OF THE PLAINS

*   *   *

With what a lending library gave him for the twenty-five copies of Dodger's opus—and it was glad to get it with the Wild West in residence—he bought a better suit and a fine Stetson hat. He hadn't enough to buy a new pair of boots, but at a bootmaker's he procured a pair in glossy black glove leather for the price of resoling, as they'd gone unclaimed by the customer who had brought them in. They pinched his toes, but when he stood before a trifold mirror he decided he could bear them until he could afford a replacement.

By the end of the week, for the small expenditure of a printer's bill, he'd sold enough rolls of tickets at wholesale price to
Scouts of the Plains
to order a pair in his size.

He resisted the temptation, however.

Custom bootmaking takes time, and he had to clear out before the exasperated manager of the opera house set the police looking for the man responsible for two hundred enraged customers who had to be turned away at the door.

When
Scouts of the Plains
closed in San Francisco after a wildly successful tour, William Frederick Cody had become famous. On a smaller scale, it made Abraham Cripplehorn's reputation for disgruntled theater operators all along the circuit, and the only fiction he ever wrote was the names he signed in various hotel registers when Cripplehorn and Dodger were too dangerous to use.

Chicago was always his destination of choice when his pockets sagged with cash. Its pleasures were many and its expectations few. There, in the fall of 1877, he was sitting up in bed in his suite in the Palmer House, eating a princely breakfast and reading the
Sun,
when he first read the names of the Messrs. Locke and Farmer, and saw his way toward a lifetime of the same.

 

SIX

A man of patience is always content, whereas an impatient man is always suffering from thirst, even when up to his neck in fresh water.

Randy waited for Frank to find him in San Francisco until his money ran out. That process was accelerated by the incentives he'd left among desk clerks in all the likely hotels and porters at the train station to report the arrival of strangers whose ears didn't quite match.

Ten days after his meeting with Abraham Cripplehorn, the situation became untenable. He collected his gear and lit out for wolf country. He wondered if Frank had come to grief; wondered it with a touch of concern, as if he'd lost someone close.

*   *   *

Frank, however, had lost nothing but his touch with current affairs.

He was back in Colorado, working for the territorial stock-growers' association, armed with a Remington rolling-block rifle his employers had charged against his first month's wages, riding fence for all the big ranches and discouraging rustlers; which was a term loose enough to cover a variety of pests, most often small-time ranchers who represented an obstacle to progress.

The small-fry countered the pressure by forming an association of their own and sending delegates to Denver, but the courts there and eventually the governor ruled against them on the grounds that nearly all of the complainants had paid a fine or served time for cattle theft.

Neither the members of the bench nor the governor had worked in the trade. They could not be made to see that every spread, the large ones included, had begun with someone swinging a wide loop. The big fish had just gotten there first, before there was a badge to intervene or a capital to try the case.

Although Frank was not offered a badge, he and his fellow designates upheld the law as set forth in the Denver decisions, and assumed the added responsibilities of judge and jury, pronouncing and carrying out sentences of death on the spot. It was a question of arithmetic, and of simple economics: a citizen's arrest, followed by a trek of a week or more to the nearest district court, with at least three men to guard the prisoners and two to give testimony. With cases already backed up into next year, months went by with the ranches short-handed. A rifle in the right hands served the same purpose in less than a second.

“What we fixing to call these fellows?” asked one beef baron, smoking a cigar in a silver holder to keep from staining his white beard with tobacco.

A short silence followed among those gathered in the association's club room. A baron with an ear trumpet broke it.

“Regulators. Seeing as how we're paying top-hand wages to return things to regular.”

The pay was good, no question, but it might have been Confederate scrip for all it was useful four months out of the year, apart from stuffing his shirt and waistcoat to keep out the infernal cold. Frank spent his first winter in a dugout line shack built into a foothill in the San Miguels, bark logs in front and the rest dirt. When he wasn't snowed in, he patrolled a region the size of a European duchy, going weeks without seeing a white man. The only newspapers he saw were months old, left behind by the shack's previous occupant to start fires, and the circumstances of his employment prevented him from pumping drifters for information about the world outside. Those he came across were where they shouldn't be; he shot them out from under their hats when he could, or else kicked up a clump of snow at their feet that sent them over the nearest ridge lickety-split.

The Indians he saw—stragglers off the reservation—were too wily to come within rifle range, much less offer conversation; in any case, they were unlikely to be abreast of what was going on in California, or for that matter the moon.

It was a bad winter, and spring was worse. He could hear the ice breaking up above the treeline, the noise like dynamiters blasting tunnels for the railroad, and the rumble of avalanches. When after one ten-day circuit he couldn't find the shack, he knew it was gone, pounded flat as a griddle under tons of snow and rock. He reckoned then it was time to return to civilization.

Two days' ride from ranch headquarters he spotted Juan Valiente, a fellow Regulator, cutting west from the Animas. He recognized his deep-chested dun first, then the man himself by the elaborate moustaches he wore in a hammock when he slept to keep them tame. Frank didn't like him, having lost friends and a good horse to men who looked like him near the Rio Grande, but he saved his strongest emotions for someone else. They drew alongside each other, the dun facing north, Frank's gray pointed south, the mounts' breath mingling in a cloud thick as custard.

“Any?” asked Valiente.

“One. Three more still running, I reckon. You?”

“I shot a boy.”

“How old?”

The Mexican shrugged, the elegance of the gesture inherited from conquerors in brass hats.

“
Diez y tres,
maybe. Maybe fourteen. That skinning knife it made him older.”

“Sure he had it on him when you shot him?”

Valiente shrugged again.

“Got paper for rolling?”

“Just the newspaper. Warmer than longjohns.” Valiente reached inside his bearskin and pulled out a thick fold of newsprint.

Apparently the Mexican burned as he read, having smoked his way through all the pieces about schoolteachers running off with their students and illustrated advertisements for ladies' foundation garments, leaving only telegraph columns and optimistic predictions for the wheat harvest. Frank was tearing out a square when an item caught his eye:

San Francisco, Mar. 16—
It has come to our editors' attention that Mr. Randolph Locke, the Notorious Texas pistoleer, is visiting our city, and at last word was stopping at the Eldorado Hotel.…

*   *   *

The range manager's wife, a tall woman who dipped snuff, kept the books. She worked for wages same as Frank, but she gave up every company penny like she was passing a kidney stone.

“Rebuilding a line shack takes time. I ought to take it out of yours.”

“You already did. I lost some gear when the mountain fell on top of it.”

“A man should know better than to shoot during a thaw. It brings landslides.”

“It's what you pay me for, only I'm still waiting.”

“I sometimes wonder who is costing us more, you gun men or the dirty cattle thieves.”

He was gone an hour when a rider caught up with him. The sheriff, a German named Dierdorf, said he had to take him in for threatening the range manager's wife with a revolver.

“I just showed it to her, asking where I could get the grips replaced.”

“That is too thin for me.”

“First they hire me to stop the stealing, then they try stealing from me. What do you do when a man goes to robbing you—or a woman, comes to that?”

“
Verdammt!
I had a dog mean as her I'd feed it to a grizzly, but I work for the association same as you. I got to take you to town.”

“I'm late as it is, by about three months. Tell her you missed me.”

Dierdorf sighed and laid the muzzle of his horse pistol alongside Frank's temple.

Sixty days, said the judge in Denver.

*   *   *

The shinplasters called the wolf White Ike, but the only thing white about him was his muzzle, and as to Ike, whoever put up the bounty had probably had an uncle by that name nobody liked. Anyway it looked good with a five-hundred-dollar bounty printed under the description and a woodcut illustration that looked as if it had been done by a child.

Randy had come all the way to the top of Montana Territory to answer the flyer he'd seen in Billings; what with tracking a trail that doubled back and crossed itself like a crazy man on a bicycle, and blizzards wiping out even that, he wasn't sure but that he was in Canada.

White Ike was one of those aged loners, cast out of the pack by some young whelp with faster reflexes and the itch to lead, who'd gotten shrewd in order to survive on his own. He sprang traps by kicking dirt and snow on them, gobbled the bait, and picked off stray calves not yet learned in the ways of self-preservation, at a rate that had placed his likeness in store windows and on barn walls alongside wanted murderers. The men who gathered in saloons in broad daylight claimed he'd developed a taste for babies and came down from the mountains to climb through windows and snatch them from their cradles, but those were stories told to tenderheels for the price of a shot of Old Gideon. Nothing he'd heard about wolves attacking humans had stood up under close questioning.

On the other hand, creatures left on their own took on ways no man could predict. This he knew from personal experience.

Anyhow, it was all the same to him, and better, if it hiked the bounty. Wolfing was going the way of buffalo running; all Randy had to show for the season was a couple of moth-eaten pelts he'd peeled off starved carcasses and some coyote skins he'd tried to pass off as the real thing and gotten himself run out of Helena for the trouble. He was down to his last half-pound of bacon and an elk quarter that had commenced to spoil. He'd carved off what he could for jerking before the stink made his eyes water, but he was loath to shoot another. Crossing the Missouri near Fort Benton, his horse had spooked when a hawser snapped in two, capsized the ferry, and dumped them both into the water. The ferryman had swum to shore and Randy, too, but his horse was last seen treading water on the way to Great Falls with his pack aboard. He was down to the cartridges on his belt, and he wasn't too sure of all of them after that soaking. After he shot Ike, he'd take his chances on the rest for meat. Then he'd shoot the mule he'd traded for at a ranch. It was hardy enough, but it had to be beaten with a rope-end to get started.